Dr. Jayne Goes to AMIA – Sunday

This morning was the last of my pre-symposium sessions. I attended a talk on clinical decision support led by some heavy hitters in the field: Jerry Osheroff, Robert Jenders, Jonathan Teich, Robert Murphy, and Dean Sittig. I was pleased to see that they provided clear objectives and a time-boxed agenda up front. Although a lot of the content may have been review for those of us who have been championing clinical decision support projects, I managed to pick up a couple of useful tidbits including a new term “ehrophilia,” which is your positive disposition towards EHRs.

I appreciated learning “Murphy’s Rule of CDS” which is that everyone wants the alert to fire to someone else. I’ve found that to be true and most egregious when operational people want to put physician-facing alerts on patient charts. We lost a fair number of people at the coffee break, but those that returned took part in small group discussions moderated by the presenters. It had been a bit rainy this morning (much needed here, but I don’t think it made the AMIA Fun Run very fun), so I took advantage of today’s longer lunch break to hit the streets and get some fresh air.

The afternoon started with an opening session. AMIA Board Chair Blackford Middleton highlighted the presence of 2,100 attendees as well as some member perks, including the fact that the Journal of Applied Clinical Informatics is now an official AMIA journal with online access. AMIA has over 5,000 members and it looks like a good chunk of them are here. Also during the opening remarks, the Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence was presented to Jan van Bemmel, one of the pioneers of medical informatics.

Keynote speaker and security specialist Avi Rubin thoroughly entertained the crowd with some great stories about “security researchers – some people call them hackers.” Interesting tidbits included that the Nest thermostat has roughly 10 million lines of code, which is comparable with a 1995-era operating system. Since the number of bugs is a function of the number of lines of code, complexity of development is leading to more points of exploitation for those intending mayhem.

He also schooled the crowd on buffer overflow attacks. You could tell from the ears that perked up in the seating areas which attendees were more or less techy than others. I did spot a couple of people multitasking including Facebook and Sudoku. For those of you who weren’t playing along, the USB Banana was a hoax. Rubin closed with a great quote: “Just because you can connect something to the Internet does not mean you should.”

The opening session was slightly marred by people in front of me who could not stop talking despite multiple shushing and meaningful stares. Finally, someone walked up from the back of the room and told them to be quiet and they generally complied.

Following the keynote, I attended a panel on “Wearable Health Data and the Quantified Self.” It featured five panelists speaking on different mini-topics. I’ve not been to a session like this and have to say I liked it, although I missed the more formal opening we usually see with continuing education sessions, where presenters list their objectives.

I hope the slide deck gets posted because it was a great presentation. I would like to have had it in advance so I could annotate on it, but didn’t find it on the conference website. I got some interesting examples of the Quantified Self movement to use with some of my peers, including an anecdotal story about one patient who tracked his sneezes for two years to discover how allergies were actually affecting his day-to-day life. I also was not aware of the Open Humans Project, which allows research participants to receive their own data and helps match people with future studies.

The final speaker of the panel was patient Craig Braquet, a self-described “gadget geek” who began to use wearables to analyze his symptoms of fibromyalgia, degenerative disc disease, and chronic fatigue syndrome. It was great to hear from the patient’s point of view. It sounds like having his own data has made a difference in how he manages some of his conditions.

The evening was chock full of social activities, starting with a welcome reception in the exhibit hall. The exhibit hall was extremely crowded during the reception with appetizer stations set up in some of the aisles, which made navigating difficult. I did happen to run into a medical school classmate that I haven’t seen since graduation. There are several of us from my class and the class following who have landed in the field of informatics. Even though it was a very quick catch-up it was good to see him.

I breezed by the Clinical Informatics Diplomate reception on the way to dinner with a colleague, hitting the NavigateAMIA reception on the way back. It is targeted to new members and first time symposium attendees and featured desserts in addition to networking opportunities.

I didn’t stay long because I wanted to head up to the Women in Informatics Networking Event (WINE) at the Cityscape restaurant on the 46th floor. It was a great way to cap the evening with lovely views of the city in all directions. I chatted with a doctoral student doing work in predictive modeling for ICU patients and a couple of other students in nursing informatics programs. It was fairly crowded, but I didn’t see any other CMIOs there so I headed back to my room for some much-needed rest. Tomorrow is definitely going to be a day for (sigh) flat shoes.

Are you attending AMIA? What’s your take on the meeting? Email me.

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